Are the Iroquois really that bad?

I can understand Venice being trash tier (because their civ might as well be called "single city challenge"), but I've seen a lot of other tier lists in which they listed Iroquois as being one of the worst civs next to Carthage. Are they really that bad?

I tried Iroquois myself (because I love playing native americans) and I found that not having movement penalties when moving through forests and jungles is a pretty good bonus early game. It allows you to move your armies better. But I don't know, since I only started playing Civ V.

To quote a good and possibly well known MP player from the NQ group (filthyrobot aka saltyrobot), "All the Iroquois bonuses are detrimental to their game". This might be only skewed towards MP though.

Their first bonus (moving through forest as if road). If you move to/from road to forest/jungle you use all movement points, so it's sort of true but not really, that they are 'roads'. Long story short, to be able to move with any speed, you still have to build roads.

Unique Unit (Mohawk Warrior) - Swordsman replacement that isn't stronger than a swordsman (an already weak unit IMO). It's only 'upside' is it gets a combat bonus in forest/jungle. Long story short, 99% of the time. Mohawk = Swordsman.

Unique Building (Longhouse) - Workshop (critical building) replacement. Workshops are generally build reasonably early as they are in the tech path and are the first non situational prod building (stables and stoneworks are the others). It's a workshop with downsides.

Normal workshop = +2 prod and +10% bonus to everything
Longhouse = +2 prod and +1 prod from each worked forest tile

What is the issue with this?
You are losing a flat 10% bonus to all production to just a flat +x production.The % bonus scales throughout the game.
You generally don't work forest tiles early and there aren't that many 'workable' forest tiles (not enough growth (namely)/prod). What is should probably read is "+1 prod from forest deer".
While it makes lumber mills better (and better earlier), if you don't improve wooded luxes, they get slightly better, at the cost of happiness (or tradeables). I mean you could build Lumber mills on wooded hills as opposed to mines to give you a 1:3 instead of a 0:3 (foodrod) tile - which could lock strategic resources.
You also generally want to chop forests to help with early buildings/unit rushes (eg libraries, settlers, wonders, etc).

Iroquois is much better in BNW than in G&K, especially with a coastal start.
Just run a food trade route from every non capital city to the capital so that it will grow. (Cargo ships preferred)

They have forest bias just like the Celts, and so there actually is plenty of forest for their capital to work unless they clear cut forest, which as Iroquois you shouldn't. Lumbermills everywhere is the preferred Irq strategy instead of clear cutting.
Most civs get 1f 2h pre Sci Theory from Lumbermills, Irq gets 1f 3h (a 50% boost!). Post Sci Theory, most civs gets 1f 3h from Lumbermills, Irq gets 1f 4h (a 33% boost).
This is also the same amount of hammers as a mined hill, but with one more food.

As to the UU, the important thing about it for Irq, is that they do NOT need to select "strategic balance" to build (or upgrade) to them, and so they'll still have them. They also have a nice mobility advantage to finish off enemy units within your territory that your archery units / city bombard weakened.

Road on the forest edge will suffice to prevent movement kill coming back. It doesn't appear to be any faster to upgrade a road to a rail than to build a rail from scratch on a given tile either.

You consider Carthage trash tier? The civ isn't THAT bad, definitely not close to Iroquois level. carthage is playing a civ with small to inconsequential bonuses, Iroquois is playing with no/detrimental bonuses.

The Iroquois are not that bad.

The Mohawk warrior does not require iron and can be made in quantity if desired. If your typical gameplan is to learn iron working some time in the Renaissance after beelining Education then you will find them worthless. If instead you make an effort to hit iron working early and to make a large number either from building or mass upgrading warriors, you can use them to wage war.

If you prioritize iron working you can get them before comp bows are out. Even once comp bows are out swords can do OK. If you wait until pikes are online then you waited too long. The window for their use is small but a determined beeline to achieve iron working quickly can yield good dividends from early war. Follow up with a beeline for Steel and Longswords and you can continue the conquest.

Is it better than the standard range heavy force? No but it will be fun and done well can be as effective.

The UB is not as bad as it has been portrayed. +1 hammer per forest worked vs +10% production. When you get the tech you might be around 20 hammers, if you have more than two forests being worked you are ahead. You get more hammers early at the expense of possibly fewer hammers later depending on terrain.

I don't play multiplayer as I imagine many units, civs and strategies fail to perform at all in that environment and the game is not balanced for competitive play.

As far as the AI goes, Iroquois are top tier. They are programmed to build their UB which increases production, they make a large number of Mohawk warriors which get upgraded into a larger than normal army, and they are programmed to expand as far as possible which combined with difficulty bonuses can lead to a runaway powerhouse.

On a scale they will be on the low end but if played to their strengths can make for an interesting and fun game.

jlim201 said:

You consider Carthage trash tier? The civ isn't THAT bad, definitely not close to Iroquois level. carthage is playing a civ with small to inconsequential bonuses, Iroquois is playing with no/detrimental bonuses.

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I wouldn't call 3+ gpt and 9+ worker turns per city, as well as earlier city connections, "inconsequential".

corranhorn01 said:

You also generally want to chop forests to help with early buildings/unit rushes (eg libraries, settlers, wonders, etc).

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This is correct, and I think it is why the Iroquois have gotten a bad rap: You have to things a little different. Personally, I think that is just fine!

Well...they are pretty much dependent on a good forest start to take advantage of their longhouse. If you don't have a good forest start then you should reroll the map. If you are playing with no rerolling then the Iroquois are not a good choice.

I hate playing against the Iroquois. Hiawatha is such a greedy sprawling land grabber. I settle an island nowhere near his continent and he starts in with me about settling too aggressively.

You know I thought the Indians would be less into claiming land, since I was taught to them land was like air, but every civ like the Iroquis, Shoshone are land hogs.

I sure hate playing against them.

I'm playing on an eight player map right now, 1750 ad, Iroquois have TWELVE CITIES.

corranhorn01 said:

Unique Building (Longhouse) - Workshop (critical building) replacement. Workshops are generally build reasonably early as they are in the tech path and are the first non situational prod building (stables and stoneworks are the others). It's a workshop with downsides.

Normal workshop = +2 prod and +10% bonus to everything
Longhouse = +2 prod and +1 prod from each worked forest tile

What is the issue with this?
You are losing a flat 10% bonus to all production to just a flat +x production.The % bonus scales throughout the game.

Click to expand...

I think this is a gross oversimplification. If you start in forest lands (which you likely will when playing Iroquois) the production bonus on forest tiles will be 50 % early game and 33 % late game as pointed out by joncnunn above. Furthermore this bonus does scale with game in the sense that it will be modified by later game buildings like Factories. So at least in your starting cities, the Longhouse may well be better for you than a regular Workshop.

rover6695 said:

I hate playing against the Iroquois. Hiawatha is such a greedy sprawling land grabber.

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Pocatello would like a word (and a few burning cities) from you.

*Cracks Knuckles* Alright.. here we go.

The percentage bonus you lose from the workshop is very bad. You don't tend to work forest tiles very early in the game and they hinder your growth significantly. So you're forced to expand into these forested areas to get the benefit but you risk a very low population, which is more important. Forested tiles can also have luxaries and strategic resources on them, meaning you're forced to chop them down because you cannot put lumber mills on them. And most of the time, you want to chop down the forests for early growth and the quick 13 production for early wonders. What's more so is that I very much doubt that the percentage you lose from the Longhouse will equal it out or if you're very lucky, it will slightly be better. The upside to this building is that if you focus on sea/land caravans and make that city grow before these come out, it sort of becomes a better workshop but only for a short time, the 10% production loss is HUGE. And it stacks with others. You only have a limited amount of trade routes, so you'll want to be focusing on your capital more than your other cities, which makes this building generally hard to build. Yeah it's actually EASIER to build than a standard workshop, on standard they get -20 which is nice. But overall the 10% bonus loss is very bad because it stays THROUGHOUT the game.

Their unique unit the Mohawk is actually situlational. These guys, I don't know why they don't have Woodsmen promotion because they really should, it makes sense to have it. They don't need iron which is HUGE on non-strategic maps as your enemys may not have the iron to compensate for it. So you can pump these out constantly. They also get a 33% bonus to jungle and forest tiles, that is pretty nice and this is why this unit should get woodsmen because overall it would make the Iriqous a lot more easier to play. Now the bad thing about this unit is that it comes at a very awkward time in the tech tree, swordsmen replacements are not good because it delays you from getting important techs such as Writing and Philosopthy. And if you do go that route then these guys are going to be pretty much out-dated or at least harder to try and work with. You tend to want to go to Construction and get composite bowmen or Mathematics for Catapaults. Which are REQUIRE different techs than the Mohawks (yay!). So over-all you need to think about multiple things, your gold per turn, will you get caravans out to sort it? Will you settle? Will you go one city and pump these guys out? Will you go straight to Iron Working and gets these and severely go behind in technology? To be honest, I do not know what role this unit is supposed to do, in vanilla these guys are just INSANELY overpowered because they could keep getting these non-stop and the player could do much about it because THEY DON'T HAVE COMPOSITES. But right now, they are severely nerfed in Brave New World. It's not even like rushing to Iron Working with Legions as Rome because they're MUCH more better than this unit that is for sure. 14 strength, which the legions have 17. You're going to have to rely on jungles/forest WHICH IN TURN SLOW YOU DOWN! SO WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS UNIT?! They are obviously meant for a rush because otherwise going to Swordsmen is just going to kill your science. But even you're losing massive amounts of gold and if it fails, you're done for. You don't want to be prioritising these guys early, you want to grow... but at the same time, it FORCES you to go down an awkward tech tree, again, I don't know what the hell this unit is supposed to do.

The unique ability is broken, period. A HUGE issue Multiplayer, And why? Forest tiles count as roads upon researching the wheel. So for an example, if there we're two forest tiles and one bare hill tile from your capital to your other city you wouldn't need to put a road on the forest which is very nice, that is going to save you a lot of gold per turn in the early game. Except there is a cost. You WILL need to a road on that hill, that is completly understand, but when you transition from that forest till to that roaded hill, IT WILL ACT AS IF IT WAS A BARE HILL. Which is massive when you need to get to destinations early especially in the MultiPlayer where you want to pump those units out and go on the offensive/defense. If this (bug) was fixed then it would slightly improve the Iriqous. Although even with it they would still be very bad because of their Unique unit and Unique Building. The unique unit and unique ability are supposed to work together, thats for certain, BUT IT DOESNT, it's broken.

Soronery said:

Well...they are pretty much dependent on a good forest start to take advantage of their longhouse.

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Yes, but their starting bias helps very much with that. Not a problem on most maps.

If you don't have a good forest start then you should reroll the map. If you are playing with no rerolling then the Iroquois are not a good choice.

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That is only true if you disable starting bias or are playing a map type that makes forests rare. But that is no different than, for example, Carthage on a great plains map. But that says more about why random civs on random maps is bad, rather than why Iroquois are bad.

I think it's an overall testament to the development of the game that no Civ is "all that bad". Just as there isn't a Civ that's an absolute god tier. Some Civs are generally considered to be a little better than others, but no Civ is unplayable trash. The Iroquois certainly have their upsides, to be sure. A no-iron-necessary upgrade to your warriors, for instance, is pretty sweet.

bcaiko said:

I think it's an overall testament to the development of the game that no Civ is "all that bad". Just as there isn't a Civ that's an absolute god tier. Some Civs are generally considered to be a little better than others, but no Civ is unplayable trash. The Iroquois certainly have their upsides, to be sure. A no-iron-necessary upgrade to your warriors, for instance, is pretty sweet.

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Considering in single-player, yeah I totally agree with you, no real balance is needed for this.

But in MultiPlayer it does. How many times have you seen Venice win? Venice is almost completly dependent on a good capital and some coastal cities. But you're massively handicapped by the no-expansion problem.

Players like Babylon are just going to get more than double of their tech when they get Writing, period. They're just going to fly off in technology and with that 50% bonus they get, they're just going to fly off in technology.

Although in MultiPlayer it is really down to your skill level, your civs bonuses WILL help you. And depending on those bonuses they can either be really bad ones or really good ones. And the balance in these for MultiPlayer is huge. Especially in the early game where you have slim to no chance in defending yourself against a Horse Archer rush.

kaspergm said:

I think this is a gross oversimplification. If you start in forest lands (which you likely will when playing Iroquois) the production bonus on forest tiles will be 50 % early game and 33 % late game as pointed out by joncnunn above. Furthermore this bonus does scale with game in the sense that it will be modified by later game buildings like Factories. So at least in your starting cities, the Longhouse may well be better for you than a regular Workshop.

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I'll agree with that. I just didn't feel like typing up a massive paragraph for each point. So I thought I'd let the numbers 'speak for themselves' .

Using maths (I'm using multiplicative stacking for Factories and Workshops/Longhouses as I don't know how it's stacked and can't find it).
For 100 base production, you will need 10/11 worked forests to even out.
For 50 base production, you will need 5/6 worked forests to even out.

To be able to take advantage of that, you will have to be stunting growth as most forest tiles have base values of 1/1 (food/prod) - whereas there are probably a lot of better tiles you could be working at the point in the game where a Longhouse with worked forest tile is actually better than the % bonus of a workshop.
As stated in my first post, this means that you can put lumber mills on a wooded hill to get 1/3 and potentially lock strategics up; instead of a mine which will give 13 instant prod and 0/3 (but will also take longer to build).

I said at the start of my post that this is probably skewed towards multiplayer, which the Civ bonuses actually have some say in how the game ends, due to how bad the AI is. That said, I'm not an exceptionally strong player (beat Diety once and my Immortal win rate is about 50%).


Sharples basically said what I was trying to say, but in a longer form. So thanks Sharples .

corranhorn01 said:

To be able to take advantage of that, you will have to be stunting growth as most forest tiles have base values of 1/1 (food/prod) -

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While that may have been true in vanilla and G&K, in BNW food cargo ships can provide the capital the vast majority of its food.

Also, forested tiles on non fresh water hills actually provide more food for Irq for the same hammers that the standard alternative.

Sharples said:

Considering in single-player, yeah I totally agree with you, no real balance is needed for this.

But in MultiPlayer it does. How many times have you seen Venice win? Venice is almost completly dependent on a good capital and some coastal cities. But you're massively handicapped by the no-expansion problem.

Players like Babylon are just going to get more than double of their tech when they get Writing, period. They're just going to fly off in technology and with that 50% bonus they get, they're just going to fly off in technology.

Although in MultiPlayer it is really down to your skill level, your civs bonuses WILL help you. And depending on those bonuses they can either be really bad ones or really good ones. And the balance in these for MultiPlayer is huge. Especially in the early game where you have slim to no chance in defending yourself against a Horse Archer rush.

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Not to be too rude but who cares about multiplayer balance for CiV?

A typical large epic game will take me 20+ hours, perhaps with cutting all animation I could get it to 10 hours. Who can commit to a single ten hour play through?

The variance in starting dirt is way too important for balance play. The guy who starts with salt will win, Spain who gets a good natural wonder to settle will win. When you get the bad tundra start are you going to play on with a losing hand for ten plus hours?

There are plenty of multiplayer games out there like StarCraft, why water down CiV so that all of the civs are equally bland and similar?

joncnunn said:

While that may have been true in vanilla and G&K, in BNW food cargo ships can provide the capital the vast majority of its food.

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True, but you are using those anyway (or should be) no matter the civ. So, to me, that's a moot point.

Also, forested tiles on non fresh water hills actually provide more food for Irq for the same hammers that the standard alternative.

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This I did not know.